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In 2010, the equally amiable and amicable Matt Green walked across America, a total of more than 3,000 miles over more than 150 days. His latest project is smaller on a geographical scale, but even more ambitious—walking every street in New York, in all five boroughs, which he estimates to be 8,000 miles. His passion for this endeavor is captured in Jeremy Workman’s lovely documentary, “The World Before Your Feet,” which is as gently eye-opening as looking around while strolling down a new street.

Given the scope of Green’s project, this documentary does not focus on its beginning or end. Its scope is more existential, about exploring what life is like when you take the time to see and learn about what’s around you, and the surprises one might experience along the way. Green becomes a type of host to this ideology with Workman’s cameras often filming him from behind, taking pit stops to point out old buildings or signs to us, especially if it’s a 9/11 memorial, or a barbershop that has a “Z” in the name. He doesn’t hesitate to take in a seemingly normal street. His enthusiasm quickly becomes ours.

The film has a warming sociological aspect to it too, as it collects glimpses of random New York life: we see Matt explaining his mission to strangers, answering their curiosity. The responses earn a collective admiration from fellow New Yorkers, even if Matt has to break through some initial hostility using his knowledge, or his natural people skills.

Working with such a zen concept but at a 90-minute running time, the question of “The World Before Your Feet” involves how it adds on to more than just moments of him walking. There are some interesting additions, like examining the privilege that Green has to be able to walk by talking to a fellow walker of similar goals, a black man from Jamaica, who says he has to carry a book around with him, not wear hoodies, and dress in a button-down shirt. But all the same I wonder if the film could be ten or fifteen minutes shorter, as it plays the same poignant chord throughout, however touching it may be.

There’s one distinct element that isn’t even asked about Green, because it’s not even a question for him—as he strolls, there are no headphones in his ears and no sunglasses over his eyes. Contrary to how we often walk through our neighborhoods, his head is always looking up and out. Its a simple gesture that says so much about how he takes in the world, and a great recommendation. “The World Before Your Feet” has inspired me to get outside and look around, and I’m sure it will do the same for you, too.

While loving the souls in SXSW docs like “They Live Here, Now” or “The World Before Your Feet” is incredibly easy, it can be equally difficult to willingly go into the heart of hated, as happens with Adam Bhala Lough’s “Alt-Right: Age of Rage.” But for the sake of gaining perspective, especially in learning how the Alt-Right thinks and operates, it’s worth the muddy, frustrating, disturbing journey.

The director of “The New Radical” takes viewers to the edge of the far right and the far left, giving both sides a chance to speak about their history, their beliefs, and then show them in action. Daryle Lamont Jenkins, a charismatic Antifa activist with a history of protests against white supremacy, represents the left. He laughs about some of the ridiculous stuff he has encountered in protests or in going through the history of the Ku Klux Klan, even carrying some of the paraphernalia in his car trunk. We also get to see him in action, rallying people during protests and offering his own no-frills charisma, on behalf of progressivism and love.

Lough's footage of the Alt-Right's existence includes the tiki-torch rally at Charlottesville and the horrific violence that followed, various white nationalist rallies and even input from a right-wing meme artist; it's like he's been embedded within the growing movement that the non-Alt-Right only saw from newsfeeds or videos of Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. Here, the “suit and tie version of the Klan” figure Spencer and Jared Taylor provides a sense of the intellectual commitment that goes into hate, as they cling to an idea about whites being a superior race that deserves to live in their own part of America. Lough’s film spends intimate time with Spencer before and during rallies, as he hypes up the danger he is in for clinging to his insane idea fog of the truth. Taylor, as revealed through talking head interviews surrounded by library of books and speaking with a calm Southern accent, has become another intellectual symbol for the movement, and a leader himself.

Considering the amount of time that this movie spends with Spencer and Jared Taylor, I am relieved to say that this doc doesn’t humanize them beyond letting the viewer know their thoughts, their ability to speak, etc. Really lazy and extreme right-wingers could watch this movie and be excited about the garbage that Spencer and Taylor speak, but Lough’s angle most of all gives a better sense of what those who want to love should know, and just how dangerous this culture is. Another talking head, Mark Potok, provides the consciousness of the film, speaking statistically and philosophically about the true evil of extreme right wingers. Bhala reckons that our most important weapon, as we strategize how to go high instead of going low, is to know what we’re up against.

From the festival Narrative Spotlight section, there’s the film “First Light,” from writer/director Jason Stone. It starts off with the whiff of a “Cloverfield” movie, playing coy with an extraterrestrial force that's articulated through lights and radio news, while focusing on the personal life of teenager Sean (Theodore Pellerin), who is taking care of his sick grandmother and his younger brother while navigating a crush on a young woman named Alex (Stefanie Scott). Push comes to shove comes to alien interaction, and Alex has incredible superpowers, sending Alex and Sean on the run from government forces in a shiny albeit predictable way that owes a lot to sci-fi Spielberg, but leaves very little to be remembered that can be called its own.

Stone’s movie is one of the most frustrating kinds to run into while covering a festival comprised of upcoming filmmakers, the calling card project. It works hard with its performances to capture the anxiety of its lean, fantastical narrative, as captured with a slick look that is commendably achieved on an indie budget. But there is no personality to the script or its execution, which is concerned more with looking legitimate than taking any chances. The film's cynical approach to getting people’s attention makes it further distancing and anti-thrilling; here’s hoping that Stone aims higher with his next, possibly bigger project.

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Juno plus Lolita equals "Flower," an indie drama about Erica (Zoey Deutch), a spunky-profane, sexually active, criminally ambitious 17-year old from the San Fernando Valley. Directed and co-written by Max Winkler (son of actor Henry Winkler), the movie is a Frankenstein quilt of not-quite-there-ness. Almost nothing convinces—not the story, not the script's view of human nature, not the dialogue, not even Erica, a young woman who's at the center of every scene, and is presented as a force of nature who's as beguiling and funny as she is relentless, even though, very often, she's none of those things. The cast's heroic exertions fail to save "Flower" from its own worst tendencies.

"Flower" starts with Erica performing oral sex on a local police officer as part of an ongoing blackmail scheme that keeps her and her two best pals, Kala (Dylan Gelula) and Claudine (May Eshet), in shopping money while adding to a fund to bail Erica's absentee dad out of jail. Erica's mother Laurie (Kathryn Hahn) is dating a nice single dad named Bob (Tim Heidecker). Bob's teenage son, an overweight and painfully shy recovering drug addict named Luke (Joey Morgan), leaves rehab and moves in, prompting Erica to try to get to know him Erica-style, by making a lot of knowing wisecracks and then offering oral sex to chill him out. "I like sucking dick, it wouldn't be a burden," she assures him.

She does this sort of thing a lot. "Flower" expends quite a bit of screen time on Erica's nonchalance about oral sex, playing it either for laughs (she keeps a sketchbook of all the penises she's serviced) or pathos, always keeping things cute or sweet, never delving deep enough into Erica's psyche to show how damaged a teenager must be to live that kind of life. The film is queasily fascinated by her sexuality, and sometimes veers perilously close to getting off on it (as in a sequence where Erica dances to loosen up Luke, at one point clinging to a pole like a stripper). This is a different proposition from exploring a teenager's sexuality, as many superior independent films, not all of them directed by women, have done before.

From there, "Flower" turns into a teenage bonding story, with an unstable, ultimately grotesque undertone of voyeuristic fascination. Luke refuses Erica's offer of a therapeutic hummer, telling her that he's been a barely-functioning person since childhood, when he was molested by a man who happens to frequent the bowling alley where Erica and her friends hang out. His name is Will Jordan (Adam Scott), but Erica calls him Hot Old Guy. Another blackmail scheme is hatched, driven not just by greed but a desire for payback—and in one of the only intriguing twists, it's Erica who wants vengeance, on her possible future stepbrother's behalf. Whether this is a perverse attempt at bonding or the result of Erica projecting her submerged anger against her absentee father and various johns is left unexplained—a rare example of restraint in a movie that otherwise never misses an opportunity to explain its characters to us.

Luke says no to Erica's plan at first, but she keeps hammering away at him. "Shaking down a child molester is our moral obligation," she insists. "If we don't act now, then other little boys might get butt-raped like little Lukey over here, and then 15 years from now they'll be popping pills and eating their feelings, too." Reaching for a pop culture comparison, she asks Luke, "What would Batman and Robin do if they saw the Joker sticking his finger up little boys' assholes?" Despite all the disgust she beams in Will's general direction, she's clearly infatuated with him, to the point where her crusade on Luke's behalf starts to seem like a pretext to add one more drawing to her sketchbook.

The heroine is the movie's least convincing character, and that's a serious problem. Where every other individual in "Flower" seems like a person who could exist, at least in theory—and the exquisitely observed details of working-class life do much to sell the film's world to us—Erica remains an abstraction, the sum total of her quirks, from that penis sketchbook to her pet rat Titty Boy, who eats Hot Cheetos and watches "Sixteen and Pregnant" with her and sometimes sits inside a carrying case resting on her stomach while she suns herself on a swimming pool's diving board like Ben Braddock in "The Graduate." She's a bundle of attitudes and tics who never comes into focus as an actual teenage girl, however stylized or emblematic or larger-than-life she was intended to be.

In the end, Erica exemplifies a female character type that critic Nathan Rabin dubbed the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl," who "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." The character can be seen in 1930s screwball comedies like "Bringing Up Baby," in such post-millennial films as "Garden State" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," and in Jonathan Demme's 1986 road film "Something Wild," about a repressed Yuppie bore who loosens up after a free spirit lures him into a wild, sexy, dangerous adventure. ("Flower" fesses up to its "Something Wild" fixation by eventually having Luke and Erica don wigs the same color as Melanie Griffith and Jeff Daniels' hair in Demme's movie.)

At its best, this kind of character can become the engine driving a film, even if she only makes sense as half of a couple. At its worst, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a phony life force: an intellectual screenwriter's dirty-wacky fantasy. This film puts the Manic Pixie Dream Girl character at the heart of the story for its first two-thirds, only to dis-empower and marginalize her, reducing her to a prize to be claimed by the anguished, ruddy-faced Luke, who starts out emasculated and introverted but becomes bolder and more decisive as the storyline darkens and grows violent. "Flower" turns out to be a stealth male rescue fantasy. The damsel-in-distress thinks she's the hero of the story, but she's mainly the catalyst for a troubled young man's catharsis, just like every other film in this genre.

"Flower" is cloying, simplistic, clueless, and indifferent to most of the suffering that it chronicles. It only comes alive in a handful of dramatic monologues that are likely the reason the actors signed on to do the movie (Scott and Hahn win Best in Show), but these are unfortunately hamstrung by intrusive underscoring that seems meant to take the sting out of a movie that needs all the sting can get. Deutch overplays Erica as a wisecracking femme tomboy, telegraphing every "outrageous" line and cheeky reaction, pushing her right up to the edge of caricature in a borderline-Nicolas-Cage-like way, as if trying to force the movie to become the bad-taste comedy-drama that it probably needed to be in order to succeed. It's a bold play that doesn't work, but it's more compelling than anything the script or direction can offer.

The ending is oblivious to the human cost of the wild schemes perpetrated by Erica, Luke and the others. This would be wickedly delightful if the film were a satire on disturbed, selfish people, but it shows no signs of having that sort of self-awareness. Mostly it's incompetent. To say that the final scene is as chilling as anything in "Badlands" or "Natural Born Killers" would be high praise if "Flower" seemed even the slightest bit aware of how sociopathic it seems at that moment. If you could pour the worst tendencies of American independent cinema over the last twenty years into a gigantic soup tureen and let it simmer overnight, this film would be the unappetizing result.

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Sometimes I miss channel surfing. It’s an act of digging amidst a more passive activity—just hanging around, being lazy. That’s how many discovered Joe Dante’s 1989 horror satire “The ‘Burbs”—on a random channel on many a weekend afternoon, which befits its tone: hanging around, being lazy. Even the title setting boasts laxness, fit for couch potatoes whose gaze wanders between shows. It became a classic for those who remember being suspicious of their odd neighbors, only really knowing them by peeking through their windows.

“The ‘Burbs” takes the trope of the spooky house down the block and turns it into a swipe at how peaceful living is a crock. Courtesy of Shout Select, which has remastered other rerun treasures, a Blu-ray with a new 2K transfer arrives this week. It’s a classic wind-down, not just for its audience, but for horror, the deceptive “Morning in America” Reagan-era, director Dante, and its star Tom Hanks, whose casual robe and vacation clogs could also be seen as an outfit for a mental patient.

Though not as iconic as “Gremlins” or “The Howling,” this send-up of the bone-white suburban America prevalent in Dante’s work finds him distancing from the Spielbergian influence that made him bankable. Produced during the 1988 writers’ strike, it’s a rest stop in between practical effects extravaganzas “Innerspace” and “Gremlins 2: The New Batch.” “The ‘Burbs” finds a primary special effect in its ensemble, including Hanks, Carrie Fisher, Bruce Dern, Rick Ducommun, and Corey Feldman. Many dialogue scenes were improvised, particularly those between on-screen beaus Hanks and Fisher, and the actors are given a chance to stretch some physical comedy muscles. The joy of the film is watching the promise of peace in these charming houses completely blow up in our faces. It’s Dante’s answer to “Blue Velvet.” You know, for kids.

Ray Peterson (Hanks) enters a waking nightmare by looking curiously upon his neighbor’s house. Just like most of the other Mayfield houses, it’s a large white house, but this one is neglected—caked with dirt, surrounded by dead grass, plus a peculiar tendency to blow gusts of leaves at whoever steps upon their grounds. Scored by a gothic organ—one of the many great touches in Jerry Goldsmith’s score—this situation seems like something we have seen many times before. But the next day, it’s as though it never happened. A breezy, light chorus of strings ushers in the morning paper boy, a symbol of squeaky cleanliness that nevertheless brings about the earliest instances of ire amongst the citizens. Ray throws his coffee at him, the toupeed Walter (Gale Gordon of Lucille Ball fame) shakily grumbles at him and promptly ignores Ray’s salutation. Off goes Queenie, the Bichon Frise that would best be known for American nightmare “The Silence of the Lambs,” onto Mark Rumsfield’s lawn for a morning poo, much to the violent chagrin of Rumsfield (Bruce Dern). Always clad in fatigues or camo underwear, Rumsfield is a symbol of the militarized patriotism, the fear of “the Other,” that birthed suburbs, and doofy, wife-fearing Art (Ray Ducommun) who is introduced by wearing branches as camouflage, pointing a rifle at backyard birds, is the after-effect of such militarization. It’s treated as normal behavior. Mayfield Place doesn’t have to devolve into insanity by the end of the movie; it’s already reached it.

But one piece is crucial, and that’s the meatball next door himself, Ricky Butler (Corey Feldman). A skate rat slacker with seemingly no parental guidance and no real beef with anyone on the block, Ricky’s the chill audience surrogate, gleefully accepting and encouraging the goings-on. For “The ‘Burbs”’ legion of fans, he matches their enthusiasm by gushing “God, I love this street.” He accepts the realness of it all, even bringing his friends over for a front row seat to the insanity. The adults hang out with Ricky because he’s still old enough to foster similar suspicions about perceived crazies like Skip, a soda jerk who allegedly kept his family in their basement. In the case of their mysterious neighbors, the Klopeks (a family whose names nobody can be bothered to pronounce properly), history may be repeating. There’s no proof of this, even though an event as strange as flickering basement lights, implosions, and smashing large bags into garbage cans fuel their theories.

All this, of course, worries the neighborhood wives and mothers—Carol Peterson (Carrie Fisher) and Bonnie Rumsfield (Wendy Schaal), initially the more rational members of the crew. Particularly Carol, who only mildly tolerates Ray’s decision to loaf around at home on his vacation. She wants the nuclear family image—a husband with a kid and a dog, going away to the cabin for relaxation. Ray, although milder Art or Rumsfield, represents the arrested development that comes with being a grown-up in the ‘burbs. In one classic scene late in the movie, after Hanks endures a ghastly nightmare that leaves mouthing along with the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood theme in a state of shock, Carol adopts the protective mother role and keeps her husband in. With an aw-phooey kick of the pavement from Art’s checkered slip-ons, Art and Rumsfield sulk away after pleading for him to come out.

Hanks was not quite yet America’s Dad, but “The ‘Burbs” shows him developing that role. It was a reluctant choice—he didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of having a kid in the movie, which explains the underdevelopment of his son. Filmed immediately after wrapping “Big,” the role of Ray seems like a more abstract version of a little kid in a man’s body. In both films, Hanks finds ways to balance the thoughtful, gentle side and the loud yelling he does terrifically. It’s a role tailored to such skills—he’s soft and laid-back, but when he explodes, he does so in a way that is funny, but you know he means it. And it shows the depth and complexity he’ll later find in more dramatic roles.

The key to the film’s success is its ability to build from a simmer to combustion—in both Hanks’ performance, and especially in one key scene: meeting the Klopeks at their house. According to Olsen, this was the most difficult scene to shoot in the movie. How do you get the suspicious parties together without having a huge confrontation? Having long suspected the Klopeks of ghoulish play, they finally work up the nerve to cross the street and say hello. Dern nearly walks away with the whole scene with a mix of quiet physical comedy (peeling wall paper, rearranging a painting) and line delivery (“good solid walls, good solid floors!”), but it’s the movie boiled to its essence—moments of chill punctuated by brief, energetic bursts: The slow, excruciating chew of Hanks on a sardine, encouraged by Fisher’s hilarious nod, bookended by the demonic gravel of Brother Theodore (an eccentric who’d gained notoriety by appearing on late night talk shows), plus the amiable eccentricity of pathologist Werner Klopek (Henry Gibson). At this point, the cinematic angles get lower, enhancing the horror.

For a seemingly slight, small film, there’s no end of goods to dig up from “The ‘Burbs.” One in particular is the score. When discussing great scores, comedies are seldom mentioned, but Goldsmith’s work on “The ‘Burbs” is a banger. Fluctuating between the intense and easygoing, with the addition of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti western sounds—plus cues from Goldsmith’s own score for “Patton”—it's a sonic reflection of a population influenced by watching far too many movies on lazy Saturdays in the suburbs.

“The ‘Burbs” was not a critical success. (Our fearless leader Roger, in his review, may as well have been Rumsfield making heads or tails out of that pathology painting.) But the film’s influence can still be felt in films as recent as Jordan Peele’s Oscar-winning, suburban screed “Get Out.” The characters—even the brief, brilliant appearances by bickering garbagemen Dick Miller and Robert Picardo—are so beloved, they could’ve inspired their own spinoffs.

The Shout Selects disc features the commentary track from the UK Arrow release with screenwriter Dana Olsen, plus a massively entertaining documentary with Dante, Feldman, and various cast and crew. Bits of information make reading the film richer, such as learning that the film initially began as a television pilot called “Bay Window,” a wink to Hitchcock that fits with the voyeurism theme. With actual fake news inspiring more suspicion and crackpot theories, “The ‘Burbs” has lost none of its freshness. Nearly 30 years later, we’re still looking out our windows, wondering what our neighbors are up to.

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Very few actors can fit and blend as naturally into Cannes as the French living-legend Isabelle Huppert. So when she strolls through the streets of the very town synonymous with cinema and cinephilia as a bit of an outsider in Hong Sang-Soo’s “Claire’s Camera” (playing the title character, visiting from Paris to accompany a filmmaker friend), the effect is immediately lighthearted and purposely comedic.

Yet beneath the film’s feathery surface lies a poetic philosophy about the transformative power of cinema. A schoolteacher and a self-defined poet, Claire clutches onto her camera and captures images of people, insisting that her subjects change once she releases the shutter. During her excursions, she meets Manhee (Kim Minhee), a film sales assistant who recently lost her job due to romantic affair with a director (Junh Jinyoung). Joining forces, Claire and Manhee attempt to unravel the full story, told, in part, via flashbacks and long-takes that play out entire scenes within a highly economical 69-minute running time.

“I’m just interested in working with certain people. I’m not really [focused on] characters or even stories,” Huppert said, when we recently chatted with her about her second collaboration with Korean writer/director Hong Sang-soo, who has a famously unusual process of crafting his films without a screenplay. “The way he combines lightness and depth … he’s like a magician,” she remarked.

It sounds like you were filming “Claire’s Camera” while you were in Cannes to premiere “Elle."

I came to Cannes, and Hong Sang-soo asked me if I was ready and available to shoot the film. And I said yes. It was a few days before presenting “Elle.” I didn’t do it at the same time. I did the film, and I presented “Elle,” one after the other. But we were shooting as the festival had just started and was happening.

I love the naturalistic simplicity and ease of “Claire’s Camera,” which is also true for other Hong Sang-soo films. That was perhaps a nice change of pace for you too after “Elle."

It’s always wonderful to make films with Hong Sang-soo, because he has such an unusual way of making movies that doesn’t resemble anyone in any manner. There is no script [to start with]; he’d give you the scenes one after another each morning. But on the other hand, nothing is improvised. He doesn’t change the dialogue, and there is no improvisation. What’s really fascinating is, (this is my second film with Hong Sang-soo, I did “In Another Country” with him in 2012); he has quite an amazing way of doing things in such a short amount of time. Nothing is fast; we have time to do things, but there is a very slow pace within a very short amount of time. Very interesting.

Does he pull his actors in to craft the story as part of his process?

No, he just says, “this is what we’re doing” and we do it. But it creates a certain atmosphere [among actors]. He’s like a magician actually. Even though there is no script and we don’t know the story, we know enough day-by-day, scene-by-scene and line-by-line. It’s enough for us; we don’t need to know the general storyline. The scenes between all actors are so strong and defined. The way he combines lightness and depth … Sometimes it’s very funny, and sometimes it’s very moving. You feel that in the texture of the film, one scene after the other. It’s very nice on the surface, but underneath, there is always something very emotional and moving. You feel that very strongly and that’s very exciting for the actors. You can stay on several levels, [mixing comedy and drama].

There is a complex and compelling philosophy at the center of this film. When Claire says, “the only way to change things is to look at them again very slowly,” I thought, that is a good way to engage with life in general.

Yes. And I think it’s also homage to moviemaking. It is an exact metaphor for what means for Hong to make movies. It’s to pay attention to people and to their lives and problems. I like the position he [allotted] to me: In a way, I am representing Hong. I am representing the filmmaker; the one who watches people, films people and connects people. And this is exactly what you’d expect from moviemaking.

On that note, it also made me think of how filmmaking and photography capture a moment before it’s gone forever. The person who’s captured changes from moment to moment ... and that’s bittersweet in a way. Does filmmaking have that effect on you? Do you feel changed afterwards?

[Laughs] No, I don’t. It’s not what I expect from moviemaking myself, I have to say. To me, moviemaking is very much about the present time. I had a wonderful [time] with Hong and I know that we made a wonderful film. But it doesn’t really change me as a person mentally. [Its effect on me] is [wanting] to do it, one after the other. Moviemaking to me is sharing different experiences each time with a different director. [It’s not something] I want to repeat with someone else because all great directors have their own manner, their own way, whether it is Michael Haneke, Paul Verhoeven, or Hong Sang-soo. What’s exciting is, being different each time.

In a review I read of “Claire’s Camera", there is a casual interpretation that Claire is sort of like a variation of your characters in two recent Serge Bozon films: "Tip Top" and "Madame Hyde." I thought that was a very apt connection and I wondered if you thought of it that way.

That is a very interesting connection. I haven’t thought about it, but sure, why not? All these characters are slightly composed. They are not completely realistic in their way of talking. Maybe it’s that kind of burlesque that establishes some connections between the three films. It’s always interesting to hear what people thought of a film, of course. First of all, that’s what you make the film for, to have people reacting. That’s the purpose of making movies. Different interpretations and reactions are always interesting. While you’re [making the film], you’re not really aware of what you’re doing; you do it so quickly. There is [a level of] unconsciousness; nothing is theoretical. Then you hear people establishing connections and it’s always very interesting.

Your co-actors in “Claire’s Camera” wear clothes with a restrained color palette. But you pop immediately in a bright shade of yellow.

There is definitely a purpose [behind it] from Hong. And I have to explain how he comes up with the costumes. He asks me to come with my suitcase, and then he opens my suitcase; he looks at the colors. There is no costume designer whatsoever, and in five minutes he says “this, this and this,” and he combines colors with a little blue bag and a hat and the little yellow jacket. That was the raincoat I was wearing that day as I was getting off the plane. It’s actually like a painting, and he is painting “this, and this and this,” like a painter. That was it. He loved me in that outfit, and the day after I asked, “don’t you want me to change?” He said, “No, no no. I want you to keep the same.” Perhaps he liked it because I was standing out with these bright colors, which made me look different from the others.

I have to say, I loved the dog in this film. He was responsible for a lovely, emotional moment.

I completely agree. All of a sudden, there is a feeling of peace and innocence and a caring presence. The dog belonged to the owner of the restaurant where we were shooting. And this is how Hong proceeds: some elements, you can predict, some others, you cannot. He has this amazing and incredible capacity to include such elements. If you work with someone else, it probably would be written in the script, that there is a dog. But in his case, no. The dog happened to be there and he made something out of it. He saw the dog and noted that he was very quiet and able to lie [quietly] like that.

You’ve of course always been productive and prolific in the international sphere, but it seems like you have more presence in the US lately, after “Elle.”

Yes certainly, the attention of “Elle” gave me a few different opportunities, which is nice. [After "Elle"], I went back to France and did other films [there], but I also did a couple of movies in English. I just finished two things in English-language (but shot in Europe.) I just finished a movie with Neil Jordan and Chloë Grace Moretz called “The Widow” and before that I did “The Romanoffs,” being shot by Matthew Weiner. It was wonderful, [with] completely crazy creativity and imagination and I’m really curious to see it. And then the next film I will be doing, again in Europe. (It’s really interesting that all these English and American movies are being shot in Europe, by the way.) [“A Family Vacation”] by Ira Sachs will be shot in Portugal in September next Fall, and I’m very excited about that. I’m a big fan [of Ira Sachs]. He’s a great, really wonderful director, as well as a really good writer.

It looks like you’re constantly working, with back-to-back projects.

I work regularly but not constantly. The Hong Sang-soo film took just five days, so it didn’t take much of my time. I just want to work with great people, great directors. This is the main motivation for me.

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